Our boat crews (26 of them) during all this time were giving a grand account of themselves and while we lost a few boats we didn’t lose any men. They were demonstrating their superior skill in boat handling and I know from careful inquiry that not a boat of ours was lost from poor seamanship or lack of courage. The boys throughout the operation took whatever came along in good spirit and did an admirable job.
The following three days were pretty much the same for us, salvage work at the beach line during the day and prowling around during the night. We all learned to sleep in spite of the big guns. We were all so tired we couldn’t help sleeping I suppose. But if anyone had told me beforehand that I could sleep with a destroyer 500 yards away firing five inch shells over my head I’d said they were crazy. I was so dead I think I could have slept right on top of the gun turret.
Every night the Japs would come out of their holes and get tough with mortars until the ships would shut them up. They mortared the beaches off and on, day and night all the time we were there but from where I sat it seemed to me that they got particularly nasty every night just after dark. About D-5 day they began shooting rocket propelled mortars that were supposed to be very large, possibly thousand pounders. They were big, anyhow, and gave me the willies.
